Letter | Re: ‘Why tear up the American flag?’

I'm responding to J.P. Beck's 9/13 letter titled "Why tear up the American flag?" in which she attempts to explain the vandalism of a flag at the Kingman Visitor's Center with false premises and baseless assumptions.

The first false premise is that this offense must have been committed by "drifters" who are sometimes seen in the area. This harkens back to a more primative era, when any stranger who was unfortunate enough to pass through a town where an unwitnessed crime took place was automatically tried and convicted, while the real perpetrators often went free.

The second false premise is the assumption that every single person in Kingman shares her obvious ultra-right-wing bent. She states that "Kingman is not L.A., Berkeley, or some other anti-everything radical city or university." Her limited worldview apparently doesn't allow for the fact that the vast majority of people who live L.A. – or even Berkeley – are not "radicals", and that Kingman is a city filled with transplants from other places.